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User blog:RRabbit42/Simplifying character description
There is a tendency on a lot of wikis to try and find a precise definition of how important each character is. You wind up with descriptions like "tertiary antagonist" or "quinary antagonist-turned-reformed primary protagonist". People who write stories don't line up characters and say, "This guy is the sixty-fourth-most important character." You don't line up your friends side by side and say, "You're my best friend, you're my second-best friend, you're my third-best friend, you're my fourth-best friend," and so on down the line. It's a lot of verbal hurdles to jump over that are not important to the story. Where it gets worse is when one person will decide on a specific order, then another person will change the order, then another changes it, and so on. I've even seen the same person change it from day to day, which shows they really don't know and are changing it just to change it. In one case, people came up with 161 different ways of describing Randall Boggs as antagonist from the Monsters Inc. and Monsters University movies and they kept fighting over who was right, including the same person contradicting themselves by changing it just to change it. There are also inconsistencies in how words are used. If you say a character is a "deuteragonist", do you mean they are second-most important, or do you mean there are two main characters that are equally important? I've seen it used both ways. ; Character descriptions One of the goals I've been working for on various wikis is keeping character descriptions simple. Specifically, dividing them into main characters, secondary characters and minor characters. Nothing further. That way, we can get past nitpicking and trying to slap a rigidly-defined label on a character so we can look at all the other things about the character that makes them a person we're interested in. If you've got a couple of characters that are about equally important, it's okay to say they're "one of the main characters". You don't have to look at the Stormtrooper walking down the hallway in the background of a scene and think, "I wonder how far down the chain of command he is?" He's a minor character. Simple as that. That's what I'd like to do here. Keep character descriptions simple. ; Categories backed by proof Going along with simple character descriptions is making sure that categories match the information the page. Too many times, people will put in a category like "sadistic" and there's nothing on the page that shows how the character is sadistic. Maybe they actually are, but we need proof. Without sentences on the page to prove it, it's like saying, "Baseball is the best sport in the entire world." Until you show how it is better than any other sport, it's just your opinion. So, if you're going to say a character is arrogant, failure-intolerant, a soul breaker, or anything else, there needs to be sentences to back it up. Category:Community news Category:Blog posts